110556-punishing-vs-difficult-content
Content ---- ---- I am not sure what you'd hear anyone say at all about leaving, most just do. I'm playing with a group who have gotten addicted to several MMOs and at one point were achieving the world and server firsts and trailblazing mechanics for the rest in at least one. Even many of them are the opposite of addicts now, quite possibly just waiting for the next thing to try. When a group of people like that doesn't even bother to log in to voice or play on the weekends, you've got some serious motivation issues inherent in the game design. Again, this is about preserving difficulty, which I adore, and eradicating punishing design. Some of the dungeons can even be fun when the pressure is off to get silver/gold, but that is the sole motivation vets have to do them. Inconsistency in telegraphs is just one example of poor mechanics. If I have but a split second to react to them, I need to be able to identify what threat I'm dealing with and take the proper course. It's easy enough to fix: make them each distinctive and do not reuse them for the wrong things. Set rules and follow them. It's a core principle of good game design. There are ways to incentivize vets to help out new players that are consistent and not RNG carrots. For example: everyone hates the elder point cap. Carbine could make it so that certain achievements one helps other players get in dungeons raises the cap for the week (and make it something actually worth the effort). They'd have vets tripping over one another to help as many newbies as they can to get the bonus gems and get further in their own gaming. | |} ---- ---- Oh, trust me, I'm on General Discussion a lot. And without an exit survey, believe me, people come here and tell you why they're not playing. A fair bit, actually. I wouldn't consider anything about the dungeon system punishing beyond what you're talking about here (and what's been echoed by a lot of people leaving), rewards. I actually wrote an extremely in-depth treatise on PVE system changes looking into various ways it could be improved. I like "punishing" difficulty. I don't like the way Wildstar effectively makes people gamble their time on a roulette wheel of loot, essentially. I've also brought up, at length, that making someone farm 50 tokens from a dungeon, even if they get just one or two per dungeon, is better than having a 1-2% drop rate, even if you can't luck out and get one early. It also means not running over 100 dungeons and having nothing to show for it because you have bad luck. It doesn't matter if, statistically, they're the same. People like to have regulated rewards so they're making "progress". The telegraphs, though, aren't supposed to be "consistent". You don't get practice at seeing a lot of things in combat, and sometimes you have to deal with never having seen a certain ability before. You need practice to get good at it. It's part of the difficulty, and a good part of that difficulty, that just because you've seen a bubble before doesn't mean you always know what's coming. The weakest link here is that, right now, new members hurt medal chances (obviously) and lower medals mean lowered chances at rewards. So there's no incentive after you master it to go back and help new players besides the kindness of your heart. It's not new players that blanched at the challenge that left, it was mostly people who couldn't stand the medal system and the rewards. Raiders leave because they have to keep going back and attuning new people, but otherwise have no reason to run the content themselves. People in vet dungeons left because of silver medals making groups toxic. I wouldn't really consider an AOE bubble going inverse being punishing, really. You're supposed to die a few times to abilities you've never seen before, that's part of the learning curve. The more important question is really your other point, "How do I get people who HAVE dodged this, KNOW how to dodge this, and will TEACH how to dodge this to actually want to stick around and teach new players?" Because right now, it's PUGs disintegrating and guilds atrophying due to the lack of rewards for lower tiers of content that is attributing most to the game's woes. But by all means, I hope Carbine continues to try to kill me in new and surprising ways. Just that I'd rather somebody not hate me for dying the first few times. | |} ---- But that's the problem. You can't have both. Either the contient is punishing and cruely difficult, or it can accomplished smoothly by random people. I personaly don't find punishing mechanics rewarding. Yes, I've done the hard grinds, I've done the grueling boss fights in many games. I don't feel 'hell yes, I'm bad ass', I feel 'thank G'd I never have to do that again.' There are games I never touched again AFTER clearing the helacious boss fight. And yes, it was specifically because I never wanted to deal with that headache again. Especially in an MMO environment, you need to make doing something over and over appealing. That's the real goal, the real hook. Challenge appeals to one group of people (and it's not actually that big a group of people...), story appeals to another, etc, etc, etc. Wildstar endgame ONLY appeals to the group who actually enjoys spending months grinding something for multiple hours a night, and finally getting a kill. That's a nightmare to me, not a game. I *do* enjoy the leveling and the story of Wildstar. All of the solo-able content is great. The group content is like hitting a brick wall and changing games. | |} ---- ---- That's not necessarily true, though. We played in FFXI where you had to put together a group of 5 people even to level. Boss fights weren't just hard, they relied on a lot of people operating in perfect synchronization to keep skillchains going. And, looking back, those fights were boring because they were slow and required very little movement or mechanical knowledge. But difficult, and easily puggable. In fact, I wouldn't call Wildstar's dungeons, even vet dungeons, unpuggable. But the people who have the skill aren't pugging them. In WoW, for instance, there's a reason to continue to clear content, JP and VP. You find people who raid showing up in random queues because they have a reason to be there, being instructive or, at least, being highly skilled and raising the overall Queue IQ. The biggest problem with vet dungeon pugs at the moment is that vets aren't pugging them; they have no reason. There are whole guilds of people who eat vet dungeons for breakfast and gold medal more often than not. But they don't PUG, they have no reason to. And that means all that's left in queue is the odd vet who doesn't run with his guild, people who don't like to socialize and don't have guilds, and a lot of people who are still learning. Groups 2 and 3 don't often make for a good mix. | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- Actually calling them unpuggable is hyperbole, yes. The point is, I have no desire to pug them. They aren't fun. They aren't rewarding. I would prefer they didn't exist. I'd get more enjoyment out of scaling content, honestly. You can solo these for fun items, or pull in some friends for a bit of extra challenge and something to do together. I really like the shiphand missions and plot-based FABkit missions for that reason. I've *already* had more fun with those than ANY dungeon in the entire game. As for the WoW comparison, honestly the JP/VP thing is old news. The real reason content is rehashed right now is the legendary cloak quest that everyone has to grind endlessly to get. LFR is really the only pugging most people do anymore, and LFR itself kinda kills the whole conversation. I've killed Garrosh in WoW, playing purely casual, alone, thanks to LFR. I got my satisfaction of plot, saw the basic gist of the content, and moved on. Most of my WoW guild's raiding is old raids for transmog and achivements, because it's easy, casual, and relaxing. Notice that a theme we haven't specifically touched on between the pros and cons of endgame is the people who enjoyed leveling up in Wildstar, and the people who thought it was vapid. Almost one-for-one, the people who enjoyed leveing hate the endgame, and the people who hated the leveling, love the endgame challenge. The game is basically cut in half by that gap. I have no desire for challenging raids. Period. They don't interest me. I would like to play with my guildies and relax, yes. That is not currently possible in end-game content. We make our own content and RP, and have a ton of fun, though. | |} ---- ---- That is what you call punishing? Don't wanna sound like some kind of elitist douche here, but that really is far from punishing or even difficult. You have to bring in some kind of unpredictable mechanic into a boss fight otherwise you'll have a hard time designing encounters, without recycling mechanics. You said it yourself, the player can experience this specific mechanic outside the dungeon in Blighthaven for example, so why is it punishing? Following your logic, the boss itself is punishing, because you've never encountered him before, hence you don't know what he's gonna do. :huh: You cannot expect the game to take your hand and lead you through everything. You gotta show some commitment yourself. But I guess Carbine's taken that into account, hence the future implementation of a tutorial dungeon. Every difficult game is punishing until you've cleared it. Dark Souls is one of the most punishing and most exploitable "difficult" games I've played, yet the guy in the video says it's a good example for a difficult game. :wacko: Based on that, Wildstar should also be considered a good difficult game. But I agree, W* is not necessarily difficult. Once you've learned how to interrupt and to dodge, most fights become unbelieveably easy. Dungeons (even the normal ones) are challenging at the beginning, but they really are not punishing. You simply get a slap with the words "Wake up Cupcake!". Punishing would be permanent death in dungeons or impossible mechanics. Imo the "difficulty" what we see right now, is just a showcase of what Carbine can/will deliver. :ph34r: | |} ---- ---- Honestly, if you die before getting out of level 20, you probably deserved it. Primes have incredibly small aggro radiuses and, especially at first, groups of enemies are generally well spaced away from each other. I don't think that the difficulty was necessarily the problem, though, it was that all you had was the difficult content, but the rewards were few and the ridiculous filler candy that tends to fill in between these things is lacking in the endgame. The latter is a matter of content, and will likely be addressed over time, but the former was a matter of design, one that prioritized RNG over currency. That works in games like Diablo 3 when they're firing loot at you out of a cannon and prioritizing it to your class (since all loot is instanced) and it works in crafting where you get a feel of control by shifting stats around (even if they prioritize one heavily at the moment), but it really hinders the PVE group loot, which means you essentially roll once to get the right gear and roll again to get a combination of gear that makes it worthwhile. Overall timers in dungeons also adds a lot of pressure to runs, and running something at full speed and exploiting isn't really what people got into Wildstar to do. So there are things that need changed, but it's not Age of Conan of FFXIV 1.0 bad. It's really not bad at all for a launch title. They just need to fix a few systems that aren't working out as well as they'd planned. The difficulty, at the moment, seems fine. It's what most people are here for. BTW, hi! Haven't seen you on the boards for a while! :) | |} ---- Alright. This is one of those three telegraphs. You've just encountered it for the first time. Which one is it? Guess wrong and you're dead. The problem is not that mechanics shouldn't be different for bosses, it's that there should be something unique about the way the boss telegraphs its intentions. Recycling the same animation in three different ways and letting the player figure it out by dying if the guess was wrong is lazy, and poor design. It also leads to confusion in the split second one generally has to make the right decision. One can respond correctly for one of the types but not this one because you've been trained to do so, it's how conditioning works. Also, the above telegraph was a trick question. It wasn't any of the three. You have to stand perfectly still in that one and not attempt to dodge, CC break, or have party members interrupt the boss while it is on you or you instantly die. It's a new mechanic. Incidentally, the page I got that image from has a whole slew of other possible ways to do circular animations that are all very distinctive. Surely if they can come up with so many ideas, it's not out of the realm of possibilities to give mobs their own distinct telegraphs if they do something different than what you've seen before. If you die to it then, at least you died knowing it was something new you hadn't seen and not because you were tricked into thinking it was something that was old hat to you. | |} ---- sorry, nothing in W* is punishing. This is Touhou MoF's final boss on EASY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjszDfNsrqc This is it on normal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0f8p1PXw20 This is it on lunatic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxL5-g73l-Q Just gonna say it plainly. Learn the telegraphs and anticipate properly. W* is no where near an actually punishing game. | |} ---- This is an S rank Bullet Heaven game. I can't say which game is harder since I never played that one, though they look about the same to me. It isn't a video of my run, this is someone else's, but I got all S ranks for that game when I did it. This guy is better than I am at it because, though there is no reward for doing so, he didn't use any bombs (which you have a limited number of but will wipe part or all of the screen (depends on the character you choose) temporarily to give you some breathing room. You can't get hit at all if you want S rank. It's an insanely difficult game, but it actually isn't punishing because the game is extremely consistent with its rules, doesn't make you re-clear anything else you've already mastered just to move on, etc. I felt a hell of a sense of accomplishment when I got them done on S rank for the first time, and then proceeded to do it with most of the other characters until I had to break the addiction. I don't get that sense of accomplishment from Wildstar, to be perfectly honest. | |} ---- Touhou is a bullet Hell franchise that is entirely made by one man (Zun). The story, art, music, coding, and all aspects made by Zun. And the level of sadism in the difficulty he makes his games on is legendary. Touhou is extremely punishing; the minute you make a single mistake your run is essentially over. And all your progress must be remade (all the modern era Touhou games are 6 levels long; no saves, and just a handful of lives; but once your rythem is broken it's pretty difficult to regain a run). Perhaps other bullet hells / bullet heavens are different; but in Touhou you lose all progress for your effort once you fail. That is infinitely more punishing than anything you'll find in W*. Fail a raid boss? Just re-do it. You keep progress for a week; no need to start from scratch each time. other MMO's do include some real punishment (in EQ and XI you lost EXP & money when you died; a real punishment, in Wizardry Online RIP you died you stayed dead and lost all progress). But in W* there is no significant loss of progress; You fail you get right back to where you were and keep at it. I mean, literally the punishment in W* is a punny remark from the graveyard guy. (No money loss, no exp loss, no item loss, no permadeath....) | |} ---- ----